As a paradigm change is to thinking and philosophy, so a Megashift represents a huge evolutionary step for society, one that may seem gradual at first . . . but then has a very sudden impact. Below I explore the nature of these Megashifts and then go on to describe each of them and their potential implications.

Exponential and simultaneous

Many of the world’s great innovations were born decades, sometimes centuries, before they eventually swept through human society. They often occurred in a relatively sequential manner, each following and building on the previous ones. In contrast, Megashifts might grow slowly as well but many were born together. They have now started sweeping through society simultaneously and at a much faster pace.

Megashifts present immediate and complex challenges and differ in nature to the forces that have swept through society and business in the past. A key difference here is that a relatively few organizations and individuals that anticipate and find ways of exploiting or addressing a Megashift can normally expect to find opportunities and reap the biggest benefits. You may be familiar with these terms already, but now I want you to imagine them as distinct technological forces combining to create a perfect storm for humanity. Technostress? The challenges we have experienced so far won’t even register on the stress scale when compared with what’s to come…

Megashift 1: Digitization

Everything that can be digitized, will be. The first wave included music, then movies and TV, then books and newspapers. Now it is impacting money, banking, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, transportation, cars, and cities. Soon it will have transformational impact in logistics, shipping, manufacturing, food, and energy. It is important to note that when something gets digitized and moved to the cloud, it often becomes free or at least vastly cheaper. Consider what happened with Spotify: In Europe an individual 12-song CD used to cost around €20 (US$22)—and now you can get 16 million songs for €8 (US$9) per month, or listen to them free on YouTube.

While I am a happy and faithful Spotify subscriber and enjoy it very much, this kind of margin-destroying Digital Darwinism brings a huge shift in business models and forces most incumbents to transform or perish. In my 2005 book The Future of Music (Berklee Press), I discussed at length what seems to me a certainty—that the big record labels that controlled the music industry for decades will cease to exist because distributing music is no longer a viable business. Indeed, Sir Paul McCartney has famously compared incumbent record labels to dinosaurs wondering what happened after the asteroid. While that is an accurate image of the “psychic whiplash” being experienced by the established rulers of this once lucrative kingdom, it gives no indication of the speed of extinction. Crocodiles survived and some dinosaurs evolved into chickens—but digital Megashifts pay little homage to history and take no prisoners.

In 2010, I coined the phrase “the people formerly known as consumers”; for them, digitization often means cheaper goods and widely improved availability. That’s generally a positive, but then again, cheaper goods can also mean fewer jobs and lower wages. Witness the digitization of mobility with Uber and its rivals around the world like Lyft, Gett, and Ola Cabs in India. We can now order a taxi ride using an app on our smartphone, and it will often be cheaper than the incumbent competition. But will this economy work for the taxi drivers in the long term, or are we heading into a Darwinian “gig economy,” a situation where we all work a multitude of relatively poorly paid freelance gigs rather than regular jobs?

Regardless of societal challenges, the rapid digitization, automation, and virtualization of our world are probably inevitable. In practice, the rate may sometimes be constrained by fundamental laws of physics such as the hereto unmet energy needs of supercomputers or the minimum viable size of a computer chip—often cited as the reason why Moore’s Law will not prevail forever. This assumption of continued and pervasive penetration of technology points towards a future where what cannot be digitized and/or automated (see Automating Society, chapter 4) could become extremely valuable. As discussed in chapter 2, these androrithms capture essential human qualities such as emotions, compassion, ethics, happiness, and creativity.

While algorithms, software, and artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly “eat the world” (as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen likes to say), we must place the same value on androrithms—those things which make us uniquely human…

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tag:www.megashifts.com,2013:Post/11581572017-05-28T11:45:14Z2017-05-28T11:45:14ZWhat are the megashifts ?

Digital transformation has become a ‘suitcase word’ (i.e. you can throw anything into this kind of meme) that really stands for many other major developments in technology and culture that have erupted in the past 5 years. The megashifts will change our world more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years, and understanding them well today is certain to make all the difference, tomorrow. These 10 megashifts are the key to success in the future: digitization, mobilisation, datafication (everything is becoming data), cognification (everything is becoming intelligent), personalisation (every user can be individually addressed now), augmentation (we can see the world with new eyes, AR / VR), virtualisation (what used to be ‘stuff’ is now zeros and ones), automation (what people used to do is now done by machines and software), disintermediation (old middlemen fade and new platforms take over), robotization (robots are going to be everywhere)...

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tag:www.megashifts.com,2013:Post/11569522017-05-24T10:48:42Z2018-03-27T22:32:30Z a new animation!
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tag:www.megashifts.com,2013:Post/11427602017-03-31T02:09:18Z2017-03-31T02:09:37ZSome new Megashifts slides and images

“50% of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way.

A recent study found 50% of occupations today will be gone by 2020, and a 2013 Oxford study forecasted that 47% of jobs will be automated by 2034. A Ball State study found that only 13% of manufacturing job losses were due to trade, the rest from automation. A McKinsey study suggests 45% of knowledge work activity can be automated.

94% of the new job creation since 2005 is in the gig economy. These aren’t stable jobs with benefits on a career path. And if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job. Amazon has 270k employees, but most are soon-t0-be-automated ops and fulfillment. Facebook has 15k employees and a 330B market cap, and Snapchat in August had double their market cap per employee, at $48M per employee. The economic impact of Tech was raising productivity, but productivity and wages have been stagnant in recent years.”

“Foxconn, the world’s largest contract-electronics company, which has become famous for its city-size factories and grim working conditions, plans to automate a third of its positions out of existence by 2020"

The most powerful companies are no longer the oil and gas companies or the banks – they are the big data / big Internet companies and platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu and Tencent.

These players are propelled to supremely dominant positions by what Gerd Leonhard, Futurist and Author of Technology vs. Humanity calls Megashifts; a dozen or so drivers that are unfolding exponentially as well as combinatorially – amplifying each other and reaching unprecedented magnitudes.

Any organization looking to understand exponential thinking and to achieve future-readiness must have a clear picture of what these shifts mean, and what opportunities or threats may arise from them.

Leonhard describes Megashifts as much more than mere paradigm shifts, which usually affect only one sphere of human activity. They arrive suddenly to transform the basis and framework of entire industries and societies. Megashifts do not replace the status quo with a new normal – they unleash dynamic forces which reshape life as we know it. Megashifts radically reconfigure the age-old relationship between our past, present and future. (See Megashifts.com).

Here are some Megashifts that Leonhard, in his book Technology vs. Humanity expects us to see in the next few years:

Digitisation: everything that can will become digital. Digitization means much lower costs for consumers yet also a mad scramble for new business models because distribution or access is no longer an issue.

Screenification: everything that used to be physical (or printed) is now available on screens; what used to be between people (such as conversations in foreign languages) can soon be done via a screen using free translation apps such as SayHi, Google Translate, or soon, Waverly Labs’ Pilot prototype.

Disintermediation: middlemen are suffering because technology increasingly makes it feasible to go direct. Examples include record labels (musicians now launch their careers via YouTube), and consumer banking where millennials increasingly use mobile platforms and apps to make payments and organize their finances.

Datafication: much of what used to happen face to face is now being turned into data, e.g. electronic medical records vs. talking to the doctor, or the grocery delivery service that tracks all its products.

Intelligisation or Cognification (as Kevin Kelly terms it): everything that used to be dumb is now becoming connected and intelligent, such as gas pipelines, farms, cars, shipping containers, traffic lights etc. This flood of data we will have a vastly different way of reading, seeing and directing the world.

Automation: the result of smart machines will be widespread technological unemployment. Everything that can be automated will be. I believe this is a huge opportunity but we are currently ill-prepared for it.

Virtualization: we no longer rely only on physical things in a room but on an instance in the cloud, e.g. software defined networking instead of local routers, virtual friends such as Hello Barbie etc.

Anticipation: software (IA/AI) can now anticipate and predict our behavior; thus changing the way maps, email and online collaboration work.

Robotisation: even many white-collar jobs will soon be done by robots. Robots are entering our daily lives and homes.

De-humanisation: taking humans out of the equation by cutting a complex human task to its bare bones and giving it to machines.

Yet, for Leonhard, the most important Megashift might soon be Re-humanization: finally, we are just about to realize that our customers don’t buy technology – they buy relationships? Maybe this is the driving force behind the recent Partnership on AI to benefit people and society, initiated by FAMIG (Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/IBM/Google).

Technology is not what we seek, it’s how we seek – and we should embrace technology but not become it.

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tag:www.megashifts.com,2013:Post/10932242016-09-25T12:46:33Z2016-09-25T12:46:33ZWhat exactly is a Megashift?

Megashift: an exponential shift in human experience which is sudden in arrival, and unpredictable in outcome. Unlike paradigm shifts which affect one area alone and may take many decades to take hold (the combustion engine, color film etc), Megashifts are omnipresent, combinatory and immediately dominant. Megashifts interact with each other to alter human perceptions of time and space, creating a conscious divide between past and future. Where paradigm shifts represent a new way of doing things, Megashifts represent new ways of being. Mobile, wearable and ingestible technologies are all examples of Megashift moments. More on Gerd's blog.